Christiane Amanpour is the first to admit that she is no Washington insider.

Her first two bookings on her debut run on Sunday as the new host of ABC’s “This Week” — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Defense Secretary Robert Gates — suggest the show will be playing up what makes her different in the clubby world of Sunday Washington shows — her gender and her career as a foreign correspondent covering the world’s bloodiest conflicts.

“I come at this as an outsider, of course, but as a reporter who is desperately curious, and who realizes that this is a huge story now, the United States of America, what’s happening here in every aspect,” she told POLITICO’s Mike Allen on Friday.

But it remains to be seen just how much of an outsider Sunday morning’s traditionally insider viewing culture can handle. For that reason — as well as the fact that “This Week,” despite some impressive summer ratings performances with interim anchor Jake Tapper, is in third place, behind NBC’s “Meet the Press” and CBS’s “Face the Nation” — ABC is taking a cautious approach to her launch.

There has been some press, including a Los Angeles Times profile, a Washington Post gossip item, and a write-up from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (along with tips on how to get her “timeless look”) in Vanity Fair, but also a behind-the-scenes managing of expectations for a launch that comes at the start of the weakest ratings month of the year.

Amanpour is careful to say she has no plans to seriously rock the Sunday show format boat, giving nods to the venerable history of the show that David Brinkley started in 1981.

The show will carry over the same executive producer, Ian Cameron, from the previous anchor, George Stephanopoulos, who left to co-anchor “Good Morning America.”

But Cameron says Amanpour’s version of the show will have a less political, more international tone, than its predecessor.

“She really wants to avoid the politics, in part because she has even admitted that that’s not what she has done,” he said. “She’s more interested in finding out how policy affects people.”

The roundtable discussions will have a slightly different mix of guests, he said, adding that the producers will try to bring at least one international guest on each week to showcase Amanpour’s expertise.

Amanpour, 52, brings to the show her own international background. Born to an Iranian father and a British mother, she spent her early years in Tehran and attended British boarding schools and college at the University of Rhode Island before joining CNN in 1983.

Her 27 years there took her to many of the darkest corners of the globe and made her into a celebrity. They also earned her a reputation for not pulling punches. During the war in the Balkans, she challenged President Bill Clinton directly on the air about why the U.S. had not yet intervened. “My question is, as leader of the free world, as leader of the only superpower, why has it taken you, the United States, so long to articulate a policy on Bosnia?”

In her pre-press for her debut, she has already shown how her experience covering wars will be useful on topics like the leaked Afghanistan documents obtained by WikiLeaks.

But how she will fare on the midterm elections, as well as “quarterbacking an hour of live television with a field of all-stars,” as the L.A. Times’s Geraldine Baum put it, is less certain. Amanpour lives in New York with her husband, James Rubin, a former State Department spokesman, and their young son, and has no immediate plans to move to Washington.

“We did a lot of preparation in May and June,” Cameron said, followed by intensive conference calls through the month of July.

The show has new theme music, an updated set, and even a new logo featuring a spinning globe. Amanpour has even hinted that the show might go on the road for major stories.

But for the most part, her wanderlust will be satisfied with primetime documentaries on international issues for ABC, while any changes to “This Week” most likely will be subtle.